Page 81 of How to Say I Do
They stayed tucked together on the porch like they were little-boy varieties of themselves, like they were five and four and watching frogs hop across the yard. Everything about Wyatt screamedbig brother, protector, shield, and everything about Liam screamedbaby brother, kid, the one who worships every footprint his brother leaves in the dust. Wyatt, strong and solid. Liam curving toward him like an apostrophe.
Moths fluttered by the porchlight. They seemed totally and wholly separate from me. I had no hope of ever getting close enough to understand or know their lives. I was an alien, an intruder, the creeper on the stairs.
Their conversation turned to Savannah and Jason.He’s just like you, Wyatt. How did Mom and Dad put up with you going one hundred miles an hour every day? Dad put me out on the ranch and taught me the fields. You need an eight-year-old farmhand?They batted memories back and forth, and, in less than an hour, the volcanic rage that had brought Liam to Wyatt’s door was gone, vanished like it had never been there at all. Left behind was their brotherhood.
When Liam rose to leave, he and Wyatt embraced like they always had, with big backslaps and a long, steady hug. Wyatt watched over his brother as he climbed into his truck, and he waited on the porch while Liam rumbled down the drive and turned left onto the highway, headed for home. I heard the rumble of Liam’s engine accelerate, then smooth out to a low roar and fade, falling off the curvature of the Earth.
That should have been my cue to scramble to my feet and dart up the stairs. That was it. Liam was gone. Wyatt would be walking through his front door any moment, and I was going to get caught. What would Wyatt think of my eavesdropping? Would he be so quick to call me a good man if he knew I’d crept closer so I could hear every little word they’d said about me?
I stayed where I was, sitting on the stairs and watching the front door, as Wyatt slow-stepped up the porch and walked inside. Maybe I wanted to be found out.
The night was so still that I heard Wyatt’s boots squeal when he skidded to a stop. He was nothing but shadows and a pair of blazing eyes, frozen and staring up at the landing where I waited. For a moment, it seemed like he thought I was someone else, and all the color drained from him like someone had run their fingers through the dirt covering his future grave.
I saw in him, right then, all the iterations of Wyatt McKinley. The feisty little boy, rambunctious and sugar-fueled and staring face-first into a future happiness as bright as the sun. Teenage Wyatt, full of questions that were deepening his world in strange and unasked-for ways, but still safe within his father’s arms. Then the Wyatt who drove home toward a tower of black smoke, and the boy who became a man overnight. That man, that Wyatt, had never asked for anything else in his whole life except to see me again.
“Wyatt…” Gradations of moonlight slipped in and out of the foyer. “Wyatt, I am so sorry.”
He came unstuck all at once, climbing the stairs to sit one step down from me. His eyes were opaque now, rumbling with fractured thoughts and broken questions. He peered at me for a long time.
Apologies never came naturally to me. I was a raging perfectionist who, at the center of my soul, believed I was a complete fuck-up. Everything around me had to be perfect because I was so very, very far from it.
“I’m so, so sorry,” I whispered. Wyatt was a lion in the darkness, still and golden and waiting. The agony of listening to his breaths, carefully measured, each of them shaking. The heat of him, earthen and full of starlight. “I didn’t know what getting together with you would mean. I had no idea it would changeeverything—”
Those sun-drenched days in Mexico that had whirled me around and around and dropped me into the arms of the best man I could have ever dreamed up. Thinking I could do whatever, be whoever, and life would roll on unchanged, except for that now I knew how to give pretty decent head and maybe I was more sexually flexible than I’d once believed. Imagining that nothing could touch me because what I did didn’t matter, not one fucking bit. My borders and my identity were smudged up and smeared, defined by other people’s needs and desires and meanings—magazine shoot, copy for the Insta post, spin this headline, capture that quote, that click. I, as a person, a human being, was soabsentfrom the world. What I did and what I chose didn’t matter, because I, Noël, was hardly real at all.
If I wasn’t real, and I didn’t matter, then Wyatt wanting me didn’t matter, either. It was all just a frolic, a fritter, some passing thing he’d—at best—forget about, and—at worst—blame me for, but I have been blamed for everything, so what did it matter that one more person thought I was nothing?
The bottom line was, I thought I could leave him behind and it wouldn’t matter. My life wouldn’t change. It never did, because no one ever cared.
How wrong, how fucking wrong I had been.
I wiped at my tears with my wrists as I gulped down breaths that smelled like roses and red wine and the lemon soap from when I had washed our dishes earlier. “I just didn’t know—”
I didn’t know then that I could feel the way I felt now. I had no possible inkling of this future. I didn’t believe I could matter this much, or that someone—Wyatt—would ever want to take the time to learn me so provocatively.
If I had the power to tunnel through time and change anything, I’d go back and stay in that hotel room with Wyatt. I’d never have left his arms, and I’d have woken up with his lips on the back of my neck, and we would have watched Jason boogie board and made plans to see each other all spring and summer. I’d havestayed, and we would have started the rest of our love story that morning.
But to make that choice, I’d need to know the things I knew now, and I hadn’t known them, not a single fraction of them, until after I’d left. You don’t know how dark the night is until you’re lost in it, or how deep the heart can fracture until you’re plumbing the crevasse left behind. There are things you have to learn the hard way, and while I didn’t regret the lesson, what I did regret, more than anything, more than everything, was that I’d hurt Wyatt, badly.
I had no idea how to explain myself to him, or how to begin to say all that I needed to. All I could do was weep pitifully, my tears trickling down my cheeks and through my fingers and circling my wrists as I covered my mouth and whimpered. My realizations felt enormous. My anguish was suffocating, and these thoughts turned me as brittle as glass. I thought I’d shatter any moment.
Wyatt hooked one of his calloused fingers through a tear-soaked one of mine and tugged my hand into his lap. I made a childish, snuffling noise and twisted toward him, a half-second away from falling into his arms. But, no, I couldn’t do that. I was apologizing. I was trying to do something here, something strong and meaningful for him, because he’d just stood up to his brother, the only person left on this planet whose DNA was spun with his, for me, because of me, saying things like he wanted a future with me, and I—
“Noël,” he said. “I’m here. I’ve always been here. And I want this. I want what we’ve got to last for... Well, for a long time. I want us to be—”
“Wyatt, I do, too. But…”
I had to be able to meet Wyatt at that sunrise. I had to be able to look him in the eye and tell him I had found the dark places between us and inside me and dug them out. But had I? Really? Which version of me was real? Wyatt’s? Or Liam’s?
“I know it’s going to take some time,” he said. “I know you’ve got a lot to figure out. While you’re figuring it all out? Just know that I’m here. I understand you, Noël. I do.”
Not a single person had ever said those words. Shit, I had never said those words. How could he know me? How could he claim to understand me when I was such a mystery to myself?
I didn’t know. It was impossible. He was impossible.
But I loved him, more than I thought it had been possible to love anyone or anything. I wanted him, and I wanted this life, and I was petrified that I might get it, that I might have this, and him, and then—
Well, I’d fuck it all up, wouldn’t I? Because that was me. That was what I did, as surely as I breathed.
